Scottish Theatre Highlights: January 2025

There's bales of ballet as Scottish Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker tours to Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre (8-18 Jan), before heading north to Inverness (Eden Court, 22-25 Jan) and Aberdeen (His Majesty’s Theatre, 29 Jan-1 Feb), and Bulgaria’s prestigious company Varna International Ballet arrives in Edinburgh’s Playhouse with a triple bill of Prokofiev (Romeo and Juliet, 16 Jan) and Tchaikovsky (Swan Lake, 17 Jan, The Nutcracker, 18 Jan). That’s right, Edinburgh Nutcracker fans have two rival productions to choose between on 18 January, surely a once-in-a-lifetime concurrence. Also in Playhouse, Shen Yun (31 Jan-1 Feb) journeys back to pre-Communist China with extravagant costumes, interactive backdrops and classical Chinese dance.

There’s even more dance in the Traverse on 11 January, with Edinburgh College students presenting a dynamic double bill from PASS’s BA Dance and Drama Ensemble Students produced in partnership with Dance Base.

In Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, Magnetic North return to the space with We Will Hear The Angels (24 Jan-6 Feb), which takes its title from Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya. The performance uses music, words and movement to explore the strange power of sad music to uplift us.

Amongst the many highlights of Celtic Connections, in Tramway, Bethlehem Calling (25 Jan) is a multi-disciplinary performance based on diaries by teenage girls growing in the Israeli-occupied West Bank during the second Intifada (2000-2005) and also includes present-day testimony from current students and those same women, 20 years on. On the same night, Celtic Connections and Scottish Dance Theatre present Moving Cloud with TRIP and small pipes virtuoso Brìghde Chaimbeul (Theatre Royal Glasgow, 25 Jan), which promises an exhilarating fusion of traditional Celtic music and contemporary dance.